What would make you play more non-human PCs?

[Flagon]

You make a good point. The peerage wants control of Ticker because it "gives groat", but that's not something tangible within the actual player's experience. There's no way to influence that.

[Bearic]

I think this is a bit situational, and activity in certain places of the server comes in waves, and since the many recent additions, interests, and conquests of the Peerage since the summer, the majority of the player base has moved there to bounce off the ever changing and entertaining dynamics.

Generally, however, the Peerage can be selective and interesting in its conflict choice at current, and the Peerage has gained a great deal of control after the Copper Torc attack. Even the Parliament, that was beginning to pick up steam, met its natural conclusion with half of the factions strongly associated with it ended do to in-game circumstance.


Before this, Dorfs and trolls was the meme.


Also, there's still some cool pcs in tickertowne.

[Gordan]

I think the pont is simple:

This is a clearly Pro human setting where humans are considered superior and have more freedom than other races, and Humans in NWN are stronger than other races , that +1 feat is a boom not to underestimate

If the setting was..i do not know, Pro elf probaly humans would still been a lot because of this boom, i personaly love play Half-orcs, are my favorite race to play in DnD but in a hard server like this one play Half-orc is like decide to hard are already extreme hard setting

Only my opinion of course

[Egon the Monkey]

Bearic:  Yeah you've nailed it. I think the Peerage is oversubscribed because with 5 houses, the Cathedral, the Groat and the option to app for Archive Scribe, there's a lot of space in factions with interesting agendas. There's no incentive to maybe try Ponds or Ticker because the Peerage is full up, and Peerage is Human Only. I noticed a lot of players bailing on Ticker in the middle of the Copper Torc war. Possibly due to the apparent futility of trying to stop the Torcs, and the lack  of much authority or drive from serving a guildmaster. Whereas Houses got their Prestige economy, duels, and authority. Playing a human means you get less prejudice from the Peerage and lots more means for promotion and character development.

"These things come in waves" is the exact problem I've spotted.  People pile on to where the action is because there's limited DM attention. When one place has all the plot and plenty of groups bouncing off each other, it gets players. Which means when a wave comes, there's a need to give a shot in the arm to whatever the wave missed. In Ticker, you have to make your own entertainment, but since it's subordinate to the Peerage now, there's less room at the top to grab power or get influence.  So given that the Peerage is on the rise right now, low-grade opportunities to make life hard for it would be welcome. I hear a lot of fighting talk over sendings and big-deal DM-supervised attacks. But for example, despite there being a lot more druid plants aound recently than there have been in a while, it doesn't seem to be negatively impacting the Peerage.

The Weavers being burned down when most or all of  its PCs were offline was something of a disappointment. It didn't feel like something that could have happened if a Retainer or Accountant had done a similar antagonistic act to what Ailis Weaver did. But then the Weavers never had control over anything important. The Accountants had a fortified bank, the Retainers had estates. The Weavers had a tailor shop. it was never clear to me what you would want to go to them for, or what power they had. Whereas the Accountants would loan you money, and everyone can use money!



Flagon:  With a stronger Ticker, the threat of "not being able to trade in Ticker "was at least real, as there was no Burgage stall. It meant Ticker did have some control over trade. The Burgage is a great area but I think it kind of killed Ticker. The Burgage brought in cheap rentable rooms with storage that undercut the Guildhalls massively. It brought in stalls that weren't under Merchant Guild control. It even made fishing into apparently a decent profit. It took away Ticker's selling points, as the Peerage became pretty much self-sufficient. 



Gordan:  That is a valid IC opinion to have in the Peerage, but the more you step into the Rings, the more you see it's just one corner of one Ring using a prejudice to reinforce their power. TBH you can work that out just from looking in Ring 99. I can't say more without spoilers, but as ever in EfU, a lot of the beginner brief shouldn't be taken at face value OC. Also, mechanically, you can easily make strong builds off Gnomes, Dwarves and Halflings in ways you can't match playing a human. Bear in mind that "simply outliving all your enemies and having a personal memory of historical events" is the sort of thing that could make an Elf faction unmatched politicians and spies if they managed to exploit it.

It's irrelevant anyway, because you can design a world with whatever power structure you want, then justify it. The point, as ever, is "How to make a world where you have a lot of interesting concepts to play".  And what fantasy races do is let you play characters with a perspective that you can't see yourself having, or with a personality aspect that would be considered wildly eccentric for a human but completely normal for say, a halfling. So your PC has to recalibrate when dealing with dwarves/elves/humans.

[SkagHunter]

This thread is dumb as fuck

[SkagHunter]

Hot take aside- here's what I think. EFU always has been Human centric, as humans are generally what we are and what most seem to best portray. There is a place, a niche place for other races, but there is no real virtue beyond mechanical to what I see most people use the races for- it could all be done as a human, probably to better effect. Props to good, creative, and fitting uses of the subraces. There can be cool dwarves, elves, half-orcs, but that's by virtue of concept and often in spite of being the said race. I don't think there needs to be any more real incentive to play non-human races. If it's fitting and cool, you'll find the reasons yourself, and hopefully it's not just "+2 ab/ac, +8 stealth" or "+2 unisaves and bonus con with a 6 cha dumpstat."

[Wench]

Just play whatever you want. As long as you're having fun then cool.  :)

[Bio]

COR is humancentric as hell, and it probably always will be, and I think I have some hot takes for this:

Fuck any DM, player or whatever the fuck you wann'a call yourself that unironically plays shitty fucking early 2000's elf game and thinks that playing anything but a human is LaMe or sUbOpTiMal or iNfEriOr.
The people on this thread dumping on the idea that sub-human races need more content is kind of memeworthy. "make your own story blah blah blah," i think you're missing the baseline complaint that a HUGE SWATHE of DM attention, server-wide events, content etc is so humancentric that some people who don't wanna play boring fucking human jim #1478347834 with 14 in every stat and got his extra feat, would like to be apart of stuff beyond the shit they have to work their ass off to push themselves.

Bottom line is - THIS IS A FUCKING FANTASY GAME LOL. It's fucking wizards and stupid shit like that, there shouldn't be anything wrong with saying hey wow it would be cool if all subhuman races didn't get shoved into the two least interesting hubs.

[Hound]

Since its beginning, EFU has essentially been a narrative about humans. The primary cast of NPCs for most chapters has been human, the most prominent PCs have usually been human, and the story being told tends to revolve around humans in general. In that sense, it draws from a tradition of fantasy that does not need to make use of non-human characters to advance its storytelling and narrative. There have been exceptions to this rule, such as the Stargazers, Diluvians, and arguably even the Ghylherd and Recondite recently, but in such circumstances the DM team usually moves to their own custom homebrew lore or subrace rather than the forgotten realms traditional content.

Now speaking for myself rather than the team as a whole, I generally find Gary Gygax's lore and the world of forgotten realms to be quite lacklustre, generic and boring. The races presented in it are not interesting, aside from a few choice standouts and beloved classics from the monster manual like mindflayers. I also have to make a rather cynical note that most of our stellar PCs and excellent characters have been humans - not because they are more enabled by the setting, but because a human character is unique and remarkable based on its personality, actions and merit rather than its identity as a subrace. As someone who used to play elves and halflings back in Revelations, I generally stopped doing so when I came to realise that I was just using them as an artificial way of being unique and different. It was lazy characterisation. I can certainly accept that some concepts that players have absolutely must be a given subrace because of how core that racial identity is to the themes or motifs their character is intended to portray... But that's certainly not the case in all or even most subrace PCs.

"Aye lad we must dig deep in the mountains" is neither entertaining nor value-adding to the collective narrative of EFU.

[Bio]

There's no denying that for every interesting dwarf you have an ayeladaxekin, or vedui cousin elf (though they seem to be p rare nowadays), and I can see where you're coming from with that take, but personally, I think the complaint is more so that to play an interesting dwarf or elf or whatever the hell, you're cut off from the arguably most interesting hub in COR. This isn't to say Peerage shouldn't be humancentric, I think that compared to the Peerage though, Ticker/Ponds is far far less interesting to play in vs Peerage, which has cool factions, it's own neat religion etc etc etc.. Peerage feels like an actual functioning, living place vs Ticker where the good the bad and the ugly theme plays and everybody only talks to set up the next QA train.

[Electrohydra]

I made my new PC  a dwarf because I thought I had an interesting spin on the race.

Then the next day I removed the dwarf things from her and made a human instead, because I realized that playing a dwarf I would be locked off from interacting with 3/4 of the server except through PvP or shallow, boring fantasy racism, which is not what I wanted her story to be about.

Take from that what you will.

Though while we are doing hot takes, I think "aye kin let's go delving" dwarfs are still more interesting then "you said I shouldn't kill newbies to steal their puzzler robes? Duello to the death! Restore honor! Praise lord XYZ!" retainers.

[Egon the Monkey]

Hound: I agree completely that FR is dull as ditchwater. One thing that drew me back to EfU was the DMs literally  setting it the last bits of FR on fire and writing a new setting. Which gave a chance for you all to decide what a fantasy race could be, and you've nailed it so far. The foundations of something great are there for making elves, dwarves and gnomes into strong storylines. Halflings, nothing yet. But there's a pirate in the lore, and I mentioned one way that could be built out.

I was incredibly impressed by the dwarven lore because it was such a fresh take on religion compared to FR's halfassed polytheism. A Dwarf Cleric or Paladin means something very different to a human, elf, gnome one. Their "gods" are those they make for themselves. It's not about "aye lad dig deep" it's a culture about being a paragon of whatever you are. The greatest hero or the most terrifying villain. A tale to remember. And that could be amazing, for example playing up the conflict between proud, ambitious Ticker Dwarves and the lactose-filled apathy of Baron Uld and his lazy thugs. The Ancestor cults mean an on-brief dwarf is innately a force of change in a setting marked by stagnation and decay.

Seeing a fraction of the hubristic and tragic backstory for CoR elves made me consider playing one of those, which I have never wanted to do before. But I had to crack through a lot of Running to understand that this thing was possible.

The fact there's no gnomes in the city from more than a few generations back means their history and their connection to the Recondite is a plot in itself. Similarly, the Toyfolly feel like they are to gnomes in the City what the Mafia were to Italian-Americans in its heyday.  There's depth just waiting there.

I'm not surprised that most memorable PCs have been human when most PCs are human. That's just how over-representation works. But with a fresh setting, DMs have a chance to make races other than human interesting. Because let's face it, playing a human is not innately interesting. What's interesting is playing a PC in this particular culture or group that humans get to be in. And humans tend to get more vairety in that. The Peerage has some variety, sure, but they all have that common set of standards.

Tl;Dr: The Big Idea
I'm not saying "Let's have Elf Town and Dwarf Hold and Halfling Boat". That just means the cliches never go away. I'm saying that factions or areas with a majority non human population give room for a powerful set of alternative ideals. For example, the Delvers Guild are a PC faction but you can tell they're led by a dwarf.  The oaths and shares, reminiscent of Thorin's contract. The NO HALF ORCS,  the ambition to push a frontier in search of riches, the grudges. Dwarf culture is laid on thick from the top.  Imagine that, but with NPC support. You take the tropes that people associate elves or halflings or whatever with. And you make a faction where anyone who joins is there to embody that agenda and those ideals, regardless of species.

[Hierophant]

Honestly I think this could be corrected if the Burgage was rethemed to be less human centric than the more upper class area of the Peerage proper and you saw like non-human vagrants begging for coin in the streets or doing the kind of labour no one wants to do. It doesn't take away from the focus that the Peerage and Burgage are human focused, but just like the lore in the Steadings where some non-humans work as indentured servants for the farmsteads, the Burgage could be a sort of slum for non-human races that try to make a life for themselves, and in their eyes the merchant class 'Burghers' would be alike the upper class of that district compared to a lowly vagrant/foreigner.

TL;DR Just because the Peerage and COR as a whole are human centric/focused, I still think the DMs should try to add some leeway for those people who don't want to play a stereotypical subrace if they choose to play one. Adding in even just that one indentured servant under the Nephezarim in the Steadings gave me a host of ideas for subrace concepts that live in the Steadings. The same would go for seeing a dwarvish beggar in the streets of the Burgage, or some halfling civil servant in the Council of Peers room who is clearly subordinate to someone else. It gives people the idea and knowing that, yes, these concepts can work in the Peerage and you don't have to follow the whole 'aye lad let's dig deep into the mountains' trope.

[KaedweniKnight]

Frankly I'd like to see Ticker Square become it's own thing again, I think it far better served the module when it was.

The Blade Boom would be something great to do over again to fix these problems.

However, I think the team was trying to make Ticker Square more open for player factions to move in on, which is also an added benefit to the many NPC factions over in the Peerage.

I tend to see a lot more plots, and more intrigue going on with the Peerage most of the time, a small DM prod with a sellsword prelude or a Ticker Square prelude would go miles I feel. A huge injection of Ticker Square politics would do well, we saw this with Ib'javi issue, the Blade Boom - it thrives when a DM takes an active interest, however it can do well on it's own as well considering the successes of the Groatcloaks with the right player as leader and the right set of characters. - Patriots too in mind.

Ticker Square has loads more potiental than the Peerage in my mind as it's not nailed down with five or six different NPC factions.

Also spot on comment from Hound regarding humans and other races.

[SunrypeSlim]

Okay, check this out:

I think the Peerage ("It") is the most interesting because players have done the most with it. I think players did the most with it because its the most accessible. I think it's the most accessible because it gets the most influence. I think it gets the influence because it's the most interesting.

/e cross

Those are all good things. I like the Peerage. But I respectfully assert that if the DMs want Players to characterize subraces as more than jokes, then DMs will have to treat subrace players as more than jokes. No offense. :3

That said: You don't have to. It's fine for a halfling to struggle to be taken seriously. It's fine for an orc to struggle with being trusted. As much as roleplaying is a simulation of human interaction, these hardships are a way to explore feelings without the labels/triggers associated with the real thing. That is powerful and cool, and would go away if we started putting flowers in gun barrels.

Sometimes the subrace has no bearing on the adventure or story at all.

Non-human subraces have something that Humans can never have: the moral high ground. They're subjugated and endangered for What they are. The moral high ground can't be taken; it can only be ceded. The reason "Good" so rarely wins in EfU is because "Good" rarely wins in reality. The choice to do good is personal and challenging and rare and beautiful, and doesn't need any mechanical help.

In summation: I'm just saying that between extremes, I still favour Peerage-dominance, even as a non-Peer player. BUT, through the chaff, there is a fair criticism in this thread of maybe some subraces not getting equal love/prompts/development in the last year or more. The humanocentrism of the hub is a very cool detail that has led to a lot of interesting conflict and resolutions throughout all the chapters, and that is the lifeblood of the project.

I hope that the thoughts shared in this thread are manifested into preludes, clerics, and PC factions. If change is to be had, it will be through player agency, over time, in increments, because of course it will, because EfU.

Don't hit me.